Comments in Batch Files

Introduction#

Comments are used to show information in a batch script.

Syntax#

• REM

• &REM

• ::

• &::

• Goto :Label

      Comments. You can also use |>< ,etc.

  :Label

Using REM for Comments

REM This is a comment

• REM is the official comment command.

Using Labels as Comments

::This is a label that acts as a comment

The double-colon :: comment shown above is not documented as being a comment command, but it is a special case of a label that acts as a comment.

Caution: when labels are used as comments within a bracketed code block or for command, the command processor expects every label to be followed by at least one command, so when a jump is made to the label it will have something to execute.

The cmd shell will try to execute the second line even if it is formatted as a label (and this causes an error):

(
echo This example will fail
:: some comment
)

When working within bracketed code blocks it is definitely safer to use REM for all comment lines.

Using Variables as Comments

It is also possible to use variables as comments. This can be useful to conditionally prevent commands being executed:

@echo off 
setlocal
if /i "%~1"=="update" (set _skip=) Else (set _skip=REM)
%_skip% copy update.dat 
%_skip% echo Update applied 
... 

When using the above code snippet in a batch file the lines beginning with %_skip% are only executed if the batch file is called with update as a parameter.

Block Comments

The batch file format does not have a block comment syntax, but there is an easy workaround for this.

Normally each line of a batch file is read and then executed by the parser, but a goto statement can be used to jump past a block of plain text (which can be used as a block comment):

@echo off
goto :start

A multi-line comment block can go here.
It can also include special characters such as | >

:start

Since the parser never sees the lines between the goto :start statement and :start label it can contain arbitrary text (including control characters without the need to escape them) and the parser will not throw an error.

Comment on the code’s line

To comment on the same line as the code you can use &:: or &rem. You can also use && or || to replace &.

Example :

@echo off
echo This is a test &::This is a comment
echo This is another test &rem This is another comment
pause

A curiosity: SET command allows limited inline comments without &rem:

set "varname=varvalue"    limited inline comment here

Limitations:

• syntax with double quotes set "varname=varvalue" or set "varname=",
• an inline comment may not contain any double quote,
• any cmd poisonous characters | < > & must be properly escaped as ^| ^< ^> ^&,
• parentheses ( ) must be properly escaped as ^( ^) within a bracketed code block.

Batch and WSF Hybrid Comment

<!-- : Comment

This works with both batch script and WSF. The closing tag(-->), only works in WSF.